As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22, 2002 to June 21, 2003.

When I started doing this look back, I was more than a little afraid that it would prove cringe-inducing. It’s been ten years, after all, and in that time I’ve gone from a wet-behind-the-ears, recently married assistant professor to a tenured father of two and a published author. That’s enough external change that I was expecting my early posts to seem, well, pretty juvenile.

That wasn’t the case, though. I mean, there are some definite changes in the general style of the blog, but all in all I was pleasantly surprised at how well a lot of it held up. Some of the pieces I wrote in the early days are a surprisingly good match to stuff I’ve written recently on the same topics. Which either means that I’ve always been brilliant, or that I’ve plateaued as a writer, I’m not sure which.

The tagline of the blog from the very beginning has been “Physics, Politics, Pop Culture,” so I’ll use those as headings to organize the recap of noteworthy posts.

PHYSICS:

As I said in the very first post, my initial reason for thinking about starting a blog had more to do with politics, thanks to the many political blogs that had started to become prominent at that time. I have just enough of a sense of perspective to know that I don’t have all that much insight to offer on those subjects, though, so I didn’t really make up my mind to do it until I realized I could also blog about physics and being a physicist. That’s something where I really can contribute some insight, so I decided to run with it.

Something I did for a very brief period, possibly only that year, was to post examquestions, which I stopped doing because I realized I would want to re-use some of those problems.

It’s also interesting to see that while I think of ResearchBlogging as a relatively recent activity, I actually did some of that sort of thing back in the day, writing up a quantum computing article (linked above), and also one on quantum teleportation (scroll down for the earlier posts), and one on microscopic entropy. I think I stopped doing those at some point, and forgot that I had ever done them when the ResearchBlogging idea reappeared later on.

All in all, a whole lot of physics blogging, most of which has held up pretty well.

POLITICS

This is the category that didn’t age as well. Which is not surprising, given the inherently somewhat ephemeral nature of the subject. I was doing a lot more political blogging back then– remember, I decided to start the blog because I was reading a lot of political blogs– but a depressing amount of it is scandal-of-the-moment stuff.

There was also the first moment-of-silence post for September 11, a tradition that will probably continue. I think I actually did a complete media blackout that first year, though I may be misremembering.

Other than that, a lot of stupid arguments with blogs that don’t exist any more, or that I don’t read any more. Not much worth keeping there.

Hey, remember mix tapes? Also back before digital music took over, believe it or not, we used to record specific songs onto a cassette tape in a specific order, and listen to that. Weird, huh? I posted the track list from a few of my favorites: Get Your War On, Geographic Vagaries, Excalibur 2.5.1, and Bronfman Two Twenty. This was a recurring feature for a while, until I ran out of tapes, and stopped making more because I got an iPod. I’m still deeply imprinted on some of these, though– when I hear “Ziggy Stardust,” I expect the next song to be “Beast of Burden,” even though it’s probably six or seven years since I played that tape. Speaking of which, I wrote about songs I strongly associate with a particular time and place, a list I could add a few more items to these days, and may do in the next week or two.

I had forgotten what an eventful year that was. We got married just before I started the blog, and in roughly chronological order, Kate took the Bar Exam, we got kicked out of the apartment I had rented in Schenectady and moved to Rensselaer for a few months, Kate started a new job and passed the bar, we bought, refinished, and moved into out house, I got a research grant, and we had a death in the family. Whew.

That was an unexpected benefit of having the blog up there. I’m not the world’s most confessional blogger, but there is a record of most of the major issues I had on my mind mixed in with everything else. So going through a year’s worth of post reminded me of a lot of that, including a good deal of stuff that I had forgotten about. It was worth it just for that, if nothing else.

Anyway, that’s where the blog was ten years ago. Next week, assuming I have time to read through the necessary material, we’ll look at 2003-2004.

Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing